Fab

by Howard Sounes

  Away from Paul’s hearing, Heather was a figure of ridicule, some of it cruel. It wasn’t her fault she’d lost a leg, and indeed she had coped bravely with her disability, but being a monopod seemed funny to some. Sick jokes went round pubs and offices, as they had when Paul married Linda. ‘What do you call a dog with Wings?’ people had asked in the 1970s.

  The punch line was: ‘Linda McCartney’.

  Now they asked: ‘What’s got three legs and lives on a farm?’

  ‘Paul McCartney and Heather Mills.’

  Sir Paul didn’t hear any of this. He lived in a world where everybody told him how great he was and every year brought new levels of achievement. He was reaching a stage in his career where it wasn’t enough just to play huge, sold-out shows. His tours had to include special event concerts, such as giving that first pop concert at the Colosseum. For years Paul had wanted to play behind the Iron Curtain, too. He had grown up in a Cold War world, whereby the USSR in particular was perceived as an impenetrable, sinister place, so he found the idea of playing in Red Square enticing. In post-glasnost Russia, Paul was given his chance.

  Before the Moscow show, Paul and Heather were granted an audience in the Kremlin with President Vladimir Putin. The McCartneys told the President they were campaigning against landmines, a subject he deflected deftly. When Putin said he probably wouldn’t be attending the concert itself, Paul treated the Russian leader to a private performance of ‘Let It Be’. In the event the President did come to the show in Red Square on 24 May 2003. Never had there been a better place to sing ‘Back in the USSR’, with its ironic Cold War lyrics.

  The world tour ended with another big open-air concert at the King’s Dock in Liverpool on 1 June 2003 (Paul played the same venue in 1990), after which the star took Heather to Long Island, where she’d already upset the locals. Paul was a familiar and popular figure in the Hamptons. Storeowners and restaurateurs had known him and his family for years, and appreciated the unostentatious way Paul conducted himself on holiday. One of his favourite haunts was the Amagansett pizzeria, Felice’s Restaurant, run by an Italian family who had also known and loved Linda. They couldn’t stand Heather. ‘I don’t want to talk about her!’ says restaurateur Alda Lupo Stipanoe, throwing up her hands in dismay when Heather’s name is mentioned. ‘Nothing like the first wife. The first wife was a lady.’ Staff in the town library likewise found the new Lady McCartney impossible. ‘He is very charming. She was a complete bitch - rude, sense of importance, everything he isn’t,’ comments one librarian. Amagansett is where the next alleged domestic row occurred, according to the divorce papers. Heather had made her disapproval of marijuana clear, yet pot-smoking was an old habit with her husband. The allegation is this: ‘In Long Island in August 2003, [Heather] asked [Sir Paul] if he had been smoking marijuana. He became very angry, yelled at her, grabbed her neck and started choking her.’

  Despite apparently being at each other’s throats, the couple returned to the UK to attend Stella McCartney’s 30 August wedding, on the Isle of Bute, to publisher Alasdhair Willis. Then they flew back down to Sussex. Like most of Paul’s homes, the Sussex estate was imbued with Linda’s memory. Since Lin’s death, Paul had hardly used Blossom Farm. The house they built in the 1980s was left as a shrine to his late wife. When he and Heather visited the estate, they stayed on Woodlands Farm, an adjacent property he’d acquired in 1989. As the name suggests, this new part of the estate included extensive woodland, in which was a large man-made lake. Paul had commissioned a pavilion and lodge to be built on the lakeside, the pavilion being a glass-fronted structure from which he could observe the wildlife, while the lodge was a substantial two-storey log cabin in which Sir Paul intended to live with Heather and their baby for, having suffered one miscarriage, Heather was pregnant again with their child. The Cabin, as he and Heather named the lakeside lodge, was under construction and was due to be finished in 2004.

  While Paul and Heather were on the estate in September 2003 they had another in their series of alleged domestic rows, this time during dinner, according to the News of the World newspaper, which reported that the cleaner came in the next day to find a mark on the wall over the chair in which Paul sat, indicating that a bottle of tomato ketchup had been hurled at the star. Food was all over the place, with crockery, glasses and lamps broken. There was no reference to this incident, which would have been a story against Heather, in the leaked divorce papers.

  All of which may help explain why Sir Paul was in such a foul mood when he went walkabout in London in the early hours of Friday 19 September 2003. Having dined in Soho with John Hammel and his PR man Geoff Baker, Paul decided he wanted to take a look at the American illusionist David Blaine, who was staging a fast in a Perspex box suspended next to Tower Bridge. This stunt had attracted widespread ridicule, Londoners coming by to heckle Blaine for doing something so asinine. When Sir Paul rolled up at Tower Bridge at 1:00 a.m., Geoff Baker hailed a press photographer, Kevin Wheal, who was watching the stunt for the Evening Standard. ‘Oi mate!’ Baker called out. ‘Macca’s over here. Do you want to come and get a picture?’ Baker urged the photographer to be quick, intending to introduce him to Paul first and ask if he would pose for a picture, which he would normally; ‘he likes the press, you know, to an extent’. Unfortunately, Wheal started running at the star, as Geoff recalls. ‘I thought, Oh fuck it! It was the running that caused the freak out.’

  McCartney told the snapper he didn’t want to be photographed. ‘Listen mate, I’ve come to see this stupid cunt,’ Sir Paul said, indicating David Blaine and pushing Wheal away; ‘you’re not going to take a picture of me tonight - Fuck off, I’m a pedestrian on a private visit.’ Wheal says it was evident McCartney had been drinking.

  A member of the public came up and asked if he could shake Paul’s hand. ‘Fuck off,’ replied McCartney. He then told Baker he was fired and ordered his driver to take him home to St John’s Wood.

  The next day’s papers were full of this delicious story, which combined the ongoing comedy of Blaine’s stupid stunt with the novelty of a foul-mouthed Sir Paul McCartney f-ing and blinding in public when he was apparently the worse for drink. A police officer at the scene was quoted as saying: ‘Mr McCartney came down here rather drunk [and] was very abusive.’ Kevin Wheal made a complaint of common assault, which came to nothing, and Geoff Baker was reinstated as Paul’s PR man. Baker strenuously denies claims that Paul was drunk. ‘It was me that was drunk,’ he says, loyally taking the blame for this most unfortunate, out-of-character incident.

  Paul spent much of the next month lying low in his house on Cavendish Avenue, occasionally escorting his pregnant wife across the road for a walk in Regent’s Park. Heather was then admitted to the nearby Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth where, on 28 October 2003, she gave birth to a baby girl they named Beatrice Milly, the first name in honour of Heather’s late mother, the second after one of Paul’s aunts. The star was a father again at 61, and caught in an increasingly difficult second marriage.

  28

  WHEN PAUL WAS SIXTY-FOUR

  IN WHICH THE HAPPY COUPLE MOVE INTO THEIR NEW HOME

  Paul and Heather began family life with baby Bea in the Cabin, their new lodge house in the Sussex woods, after the builders finished work in February 2004. Essentially, Sir Paul was seeking to recreate the snug family life he’d enjoyed with Linda when they came down from London to live in Waterfall, his original arboreal cottage on the other side of the estate. The two homes were strikingly similar, but this was not a comparable marriage.

  The union was not yet an unremitting Hell. The couple had their good days, and could even appear very happy together, as when Paul invited Dave Gilmour and Nitin Sawhney to dinner. Nitin liked what he had seen of Heather so far, though he noted that, despite being half her husband’s age, she lacked Paul’s joie de vivre. ‘She seemed quite jaded in comparison to him. He seemed [like] somebody who was a young person in an older body - he’s very boyish.’ Before dinner, Paul too
k his guests out to a shed in the woods where he kept drinks, and mixed cocktails. Heather came down from the Cabin and joined them, telling the men how Paul had swept her off her feet when they met. She cooked and served a vegetarian meal, and then they all jammed around the piano - Heather playing sax, an instrument she had a passing acquaintance with. Husband and wife seemed en rapport that evening, and Paul did everything he could to keep Heather happy in the days ahead.

  That Christmas, Sir Paul had given his wife a second £250,000 cash gift, meaning he’d given her £ 500,000 ($765,000) in the space of 12 months. She used the money to buy a £450,000 ($688,500) apartment at Thames Reach, a new apartment complex on the River Thames at Hammersmith. This was in addition to the beach house Paul had bought for her on the south coast, and his own homes in Sussex, Merseyside, London, Scotland and the United States, giving the couple the run of at least 13 properties.64 Paul also used his contacts to get Heather a star guest to interview when she filled in as presenter on Larry King Live in April 2004. At Paul’s request, Paul Newman agreed to be quizzed by Heather, who made a poor job of the interview in the opinion of critics. Despite this flop, Heather remained ambitious to establish herself as a media personality in the United States, which was in itself a significant cause of disagreement in the marriage. While Paul was happy to visit the USA regularly, he wanted to continue to live in the UK, and to bring Bea up in England, as he had raised his older children. He didn’t want Bea’s mother abroad for too much of the year.

  In reply, Heather grumbled that Paul expected her to accompany him everywhere he went, according to divorce papers leaked to the press. It was alleged in the documents that Heather had other complaints, such as her claim that Paul didn’t want her to breastfeed Beatrice, telling his wife ‘they are my breasts’ and ‘I don’t want a mouthful of breast milk’. Heather breastfed her baby for six weeks until Paul supposedly wore her down, after which she gave up, feeling ‘miserable and demoralised’. Heather was still having surgical procedures done because of her 1993 accident, and she was allegedly unhappy about having to defer one such operation to accommodate Paul’s holiday plans. She also wearied of Paul’s request that she cook for them every night, like his mum and Linda had done. According to the divorce papers, Paul apparently expected Heather to play the established role of a traditional housewife/mother, even when she was hobbling around with a broken pelvic plate (as she was at Christmas). The list of alleged complaints grew longer: she liked to get up early, but he slept late, and he wanted her beside him when he woke. She wanted to use a bedpan in the night, because she found getting to the bathroom difficult; he ‘objected vociferously, saying that it would be like being in “an old woman’s home”’.

  Heather was also at loggerheads with Paul’s pot-smoking PR man, Geoff Baker, a rare survivor of the Paul and Linda era (as Eric Stewart noted, Paul had let many of the old staff go since Heather had come on the scene). Heather and Geoff were like cat and dog, barely on speaking terms by the time Paul’s entourage squelched onto Worthy Farm in Somerset on Saturday 26 June 2004 to headline the Glastonbury Festival.

  Sir Paul had heard from his friends what a great gig Glastonbury was - one of the largest and most famous music festivals in the world, as well as a delightfully eccentric event - so he told his office to contact the festival’s farmer-founder Michael Eavis in 2003 asking if he could accommodate Macca at Glastonbury that year. When Eavis reported that the headline Saturday night slot was already taken by Radiohead, it was arranged that Paul would bring his show to Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage in 2004 instead. ‘He brought all the trimmings with him, he had all the gas lights … so much production. We were quite overwhelmed at the amount of energy that his people put into that show,’ says Eavis, who felt a personal connection to Paul as a man in his 60s who’d grown up with the Beatles’ music and who, like Paul, had recently lost a wife to cancer.

  The Glastonbury Festival attracted 150,000 people over the weekend of 25-27 June 2004, the main arena packed for the headline show on Saturday night, a vast and muddy medieval army of an audience waving banners and flags under driving rain as Sir Paul began his set. Glastonbury is, of course, near Stonehenge, with numerous other ancient and supposedly mystical sites in the area, which captured the interest of a star who’d always had a weakness for mumbo-jumbo.65 ‘Standing in the conference of key stones we are buzzing,’ Paul told his audience excitedly, apparently feeling the magick. Clearly exhilarated, he proceeded to give one of the best shows of his life, two and a half hours of music complete with his greatest hits and choicest Beatles anecdotes. American audiences loved it when Paul talked to them from the stage about the Beatles, but Macca had always been viewed with more scepticism at home. ‘Boring!’ shouted irreverent young hecklers as Paul rattled on about the 1960s, which was of less interest to these scamps than what they might be doing in the 2060s. There were also sarcastic requests for ‘Rupert and the Frog Song’. Turning a deaf ear, Sir Paul continued to deliver a powerhouse set. Even the cheekiest urchins in the crowd were singing along to ‘Hey Jude’ by the end.

  When Paul came off stage, he asked to see Michael Eavis. ‘Normally they are so drained afterwards that they don’t want to see anybody, so I didn’t expect him to be chatty and friendly and everything, but he was so excited, he was so thrilled, he was weeping tears of joy. It was such a good show,’ says the impresario-farmer. ‘The pair of us we just hugged each other for a bit. It was lovely.’ The men also spoke of having lost their wives to cancer, but then Eavis - a gentle, lovable fellow - saw Heather looking daggers at them from across the room and sensed she wanted him to leave. ‘She was a bit edgy.’

  Geoff Baker didn’t survive the Heather era. He left Sir Paul’s employ three months after Glastonbury, with an unusually harsh testimonial from the boss. Reacting to a suggestion in the press that Heather was behind Baker’s sacking, Paul said in a statement: ‘The actual truth, which I had been trying to spare him the embarrassment of going public with, was that he had gradually been getting more and more unstable over the past few years.’ The David Blaine incident had apparently been a turning point.

  I was trying to keep out of sight of a small crowd of photographers when to my horror I saw Geoff pointing me out to the paparazzi who then ran towards me in a feeding frenzy … just another example of his crazy behaviour. After that I tried to let him down gently, but it was my decision alone to let him go as I didn’t want that kind of instability around me.

  After 15 years of loyal service, Baker took his sacking remarkably well. ‘He was pissed off, wasn’t he? He was having a go at me. I can’t lie and say I wasn’t drinking too much, because I was.’ Baker remained touchingly loyal to his old boss after his dismissal, never saying a bad word about him. Heather was another matter. Baker had grown to loathe the woman, as so many had.

  When Linda McCartney read hurtful things about herself in the press, she wisely chose to turn the other cheek, expressing her frustration only at the very end of her life in ‘The Light Comes from Within’. She would have made it far worse had she moaned. This is the mistake Heather now made. She was increasingly and obviously irked by the negative press she received in Britain, which grew increasingly hostile as a consensus developed that she was a shrill, devious, self-publicising harridan into whose clutches a great man had tragically fallen. When Heather was informed in advance that the Sunday Times would be running a story in which it was observed that losing a leg was the best thing that ever happened to Heather, she allegedly implored Paul to intervene. He was scheduled to play at the forthcoming Super Bowl, his second appearance at the event in three years. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network broadcast the Super Bowl and Murdoch owned the Sunday Times. According to divorce papers, Heather suggested Paul tell Murdoch he wouldn’t play the show unless the press baron pulled the Times story. Paul refused. Yet he did register dismay at the article in a defence of Heather on her website, writing that the press were ‘wildly wrong’ about his wife, and denying stories about he
r manipulating him. Contrary to reports, she hadn’t made him have plastic surgery; nor made him dye his hair; he’d been doing that for years; she wasn’t behind the sacking of Baker; and she wasn’t at loggerheads with his children. ‘The media sometimes suggests a rift between my kids and Heather, but in fact we get on great …’ Which was not what others said.

  After appearing at Live 8 in the summer of 2005, Paul took his band back on the road in September with a string of US arena shows. To warm the audience up before each concert, a montage of images were shown on the enormous display screens alongside the stage, telling the story of Paul’s life in pictures, his marriage to Linda passed over quickly, followed by abundant images of his winsome second wife. Paul had a new album to plug, Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, another of his occasional one-man-band records, made in London and Los Angeles with the British producer Nigel Goodrich, who’d made his name with Radiohead. Being Paul’s producer was frequently a poisoned chalice, as we have seen, and this collaboration got off to a typically difficult start when Goodrich dared urge Sir Paul to try harder. ‘Fuck off, Nigel!’ replied the star, who walked out of the studio. He decided to persevere with Goodrich nonetheless, and having a strong character behind the glass helped Paul create a good album. Standout tracks include ‘Jenny Wren’ and ‘Promise to You Girl’, in which Paul refers to sweeping away the dead leaves of his past. Most intriguing were the words to ‘Riding to Vanity Fair’, in which Paul sang about someone who’d used him on their journey to Vanity Fair, the fictional town of the depraved and the dishonest in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, which Paul had a copy of as a boy. Vanity Fair is also a satirical novel by Thackeray, of course, featuring ‘the odious little adventuress’ Becky Sharp, a scheming minx with a resemblance to Heather Mills, though Paul surely wasn’t thinking of his wife in that way. He wouldn’t say who he had in mind for the song.